Michigan Radio’s Picture Project is an experimental blog and forum for photographs that address Michigan people, places, events, and issues.

See the site for new features on Grand Rapids ArtPrize 2012 and Detroit Design Festival 2012.

Now in its fourth year, ArtPrize is an open art competition sprawling across downtown Grand Rapids--in galleries, on the street, and all over the city.

The documentary "Burn" made its debut in Detroit over the weekend.

The film was shot by Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez.

The filmmakers say they were inspired to make a movie about Detroit firefighters from this great NPR story by Jackie Lydon from 2008:

Yesterday, the Canadian Auto Workers union said that 90 percent of unionized Chrysler workers voted to approve a new deal with the company.

Ford and GM workers in Canada approved their deals last week.

So what did they get?

Here's a good write-up on the negotiations between the Canadian Auto Workers and Detroit's Big Three automakers from the Detroit Free Press' Brent Snavely.

A special task force starts work this week to try to come up with a plan to better spend state tax dollars to fix Michigan’s roads.

The Michigan Department of Transportation is spending about a billion dollars building and repairing the state’s roads this year.

But to keep pace with what’s needed to just maintain the state’s infrastructure, its estimated Michigan would need to spend $1.4 billion.

State Senator Roger Kahn wonders if that money is being spent efficiently enough.

Most of the time, the media cover people in a way that portrays most of us as being essentially one-dimensional. 

We are doctors or lawyers, filmmakers or politicians; gourmet cooks or entertainers, et cetera. I think that we also miss a fair amount of fascinating people who don’t fit into traditional categories.

This summer, I met one such man, a soft-spoken East Lansing attorney named Bob Baldori, who has helped get a lot of high-tech startup firms off the ground in a number of states.